MAGGIE and I were on the footpath between Southwold and Walberswick on a warm April morning when we caught a brief glimpse of the sudden ascent of a lark from the low-lying field beside us, and then it was lost to sight in the heavens. Lost to sight, but not to sound; for we heard the glorious outpouring of its song, flowering, scattering, radiating in the sky above us. The song of the bird brought immediately to my mind the song of a poet who turned and personally hailed the lark herself, not in her outward and visible form, but in her true inward and spiritual meaning:

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from Heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

That long last line of Shelley’s opening stanza captures perfectly the abundant, ebullient overflowing of the lark’s song itself. Hearing that song, one’s own heart is inevitably stirred and lifted; so it is unsurprising that Shakespeare also reached for the image of the lark ascending at the wonderful turn, or volta, of his 29th Sonnet, when, after nine lines of misery and loneliness, beweeping his “outcast state”, and troubling “deaf heaven” with his “bootless cries”, he remembers suddenly his beloved, and everything changes. Only the sight and sound of a rising lark can express adequately the transformation:

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate. . .

The word “heaven” returns in the poem; but it is now no longer “deaf heaven”: it is a heaven alive with song, and more than song; for Shakespeare chooses the word “hymns”, and we almost have to read it twice to realise that now it is not only the lark, but the heart itself, that is singing.

As we stood in that field, I knew that we were hearing the same “profuse strains” as moved Shelley and Shakespeare: a knowledge that intensifies the experience. But there is something more. Maggie and I both love Vaughan Williams’s exquisite piece The Lark Ascending, and it is almost impossible not to hear his music accompanying the lark, even as the lark accompanies the heart singing its hymns at heaven’s gate. In fact, Vaughan Williams was also as much inspired by a poet as by the bird itself; for, on an early draft of the score, he inscribed verses from George Meredith’s poem “The Lark Ascending”:

He rises and begins to round,
He drops the silver chain of sound,
Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake. . .

Shelley admired, rightly, the “unpremeditated art” of the skylark; and yet that art is enhanced by the deeply premeditated art of poor earthbound creatures such as ourselves. “The silver chain of sound” is all the more burnished and beautiful for us, because among its “many links” are all the links with poetry and music summoned by and celebrating that song.